A statue of Louis Agassiz, a prominent naturalist and geologist, on Stanford's Zoology building fell during the 1906 earthquake that hit San Francisco. This was the reaction on campus:
People came running from the quad with such sober faces, but when they saw him they couldn’t help laughing, and one fellow went up and shook hands with him.
Stanford President David Starr Jordan later wrote, "Somebody-Dr. Angell, perhaps-remarked that 'Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.'"
Amazingly only his nose was broken in the fall.
Today this looks like a contemporary art piece one would find at Art Basel or The Armory Show.